Bar

“Remember me?” she asked. “Because I sure as shit remember you.”

It didn’t come back to me right away, but her face was familiar. Then it came back to me.

A few months ago, I had been hired to take out a man named Henry Shaheen. He was a human trafficker who provided girls ranging from toddlers to teenagers for the Arabian sex-slave market. The father of one of his victims wanted him taken out, and hired me to do it. I had intercepted him at a container port in Boston as he was preparing to transfer a truckload of girls onto a freighter bound for the Middle East. I had taken out Shaheen at the scene, but the men with him had gotten away with the truck.

I followed them up into southern New Hampshire, where they had driven down a wood road to eliminate the girls. In the back of the truck with the girls was a young woman who had acted as Shaheen’s groomer, luring the girls in and pretending to be one of them in order to keep them calm until the ship left port.

When I killed the men who had been driving the truck, she acted like she was grateful to me for saving her, and had almost convinced me that she would get them to safety. I was almost back on the road when I realized that she had known too much about the truck to not be in on the job, so I had gone back and found her about to kill the girls in the back of the truck. I had shot her in the wrist of her gun hand with a high-explosive round and then run her over with the truck.

O’Leary’s bar smelled of piss and vomit. I stood in the doorway, tried to revoke the smell from my nostrils.

I used to frequent this joint a few years ago, before Ginger’s death. I drank pretty hard back then. I would wake up at five in the morning, have a few glasses of Hamilton’s bourbon. On the way to work I’d have a splash of gin. For lunch, I always had a few beers with my partner Kitna. Get home and wind down with a few more beers and catch a game on TV before getting into bed with Ginger. That’s how my day went.

I don’t drink anymore. Not after Ginger died.

Most men, after their wives met their end, started dinking more. At least the ones I know. Not me. It sobered me up good. Real good. Of course the men I usually deal with are turds anyway. The kind of scum you read in the paper they were fried in the electric chair, or given the more humane lethal injection, and you wouldn’t even care they died.

At least I can say I never mourned them. Never really cared for anyone else but Ginger.

Ginger was a good girl until she met me. I know the papers have said other things. I don’t care. I’m not talking about social niceties in western civilization.  I’m talking about a lovely, nice person, who almost always helped others, even if they weren’t friends or family. I know that she sold herself on occasion. She had to do what she had to do. That’s how we met. I enjoyed her on occasion as well, but it was always gentle, even when it was rough.